Chilling Skies

Perhaps this is just the sort of day for chilling reflection. It's not the dead of winter any longer, God be praised, but the sky is a heavy leaden gray, and the wind is a persistent thing, with a damp chill that settles in the bones and seems to take root there.

I've been told that this kind of weather is a sign of spring. Perhaps it is. A winter sky, even when it's dark, doesn't hang as low as this and somehow doesn't feel quite as foreboding. Perhaps it's just that in the spring the sense of contrast is greater. Perhaps the sense that it just shouldn't be this way is closer to the surface in all of us. Somehow, the greater the promise, the greater the sense of having been wronged when it begins to seem as though the promise will fail.

It would be nice if there really were a Mother Nature, some one person, a reasonable creature, whom we could approach and to whom we could say, "Wait a minute, this just isn't the way it is supposed to be. How could you screw up so badly?" But there isn't. Nobody screwed up at all. In fact, in a dreadful sort of way, things are working as they should.

All the little pieces, all the wheels and gears in the machine, each is presumably at least, functioning as it should... air pressure, temperature, humidity, the jet stream, the position of the sun, and on and on... each doing just as it ought, as it has been appointed to do... and yet, somehow, the end result of all this proper functioning is so improper, so wrong.

And, somehow, that all seems to make it just so much worse. A properly functioning system should produce well, and pleasantly. When it doesn't, and there is no good reason why, it chills you.

Well, if it sounds as though there should be a point buried somewhere in all of this, there is. It's in the Gospel, in the Passion narratives. I can remember being taught in catechism that the condemnation of Christ, His arrest and execution, was a thing done in raging blood lust, the work of an obviously evil even demonic lynch mob. And for a good many years, that rang true for me. What else could possibly account for such an evil? It had to be the work of a people gone mad, a society that had violated every principle it ever had, that had lost all sense of righteousness.

There was almost a satisfaction for me in that image. Such evil seemed so remote from my life. I, for one, could never turn so completely. After all, I'm not a demon, I'm not an evil person. I firmly support all the noblest principles of my society. I am irrevocably dedicated to the just and orderly functioning of that society. In a word, I would never crucify anybody.

I can remember very clearly the moment when that image fell apart. I was reading the Passion story as I had any number of times before. I can't remember what the weather was like that day, but I think it must have been just such a day as this. A grim chill, a wrongful chill. Because it suddenly dawned on me as I read, that what I had been told in catechism simply wasn't true. The fact is, the arrest and execution of Christ was a perfectly legal, orderly affair. Each of the actors in that painful drama had done exactly as he or she was supposed to do. Pilate wanted only to keep the peace. He had been sent by the Emperor to do just that. Herod wanted to offend no one, neither the Romans nor the Jews. His own future, and that of his kingdom, depended on his ability to do just that. The Pharisees wanted to apply the sacred law of Moses, exactly as it was written, no more no less. Well, Christ had clearly blasphemed. He had put Himself on a level with God, and that was punishable by death. The Zealots, presumably even Judas Iscariot, wanted the freedom of their country, and pushing Christ to the front, if He indeed was the Messiah they had so patiently awaited for so many centuries, was certainly the thing to do. There was no villainy here, no deceit, no subterfuge. There didn't have to be.

You see, the really frightening thing in all of this is not that demons were loose in the land, rather that perfectly ordinary people, no better or worse than anyone else, with perfectly ordinary, even laudable goals, working through a very old and effective system, somehow managed to legally kill the Son of God. And far far worse, they managed to do so with a sense of righteousness. They managed to congratulate themselves afterwards on a job well done. There were any number of good reasons why Christ must die, and when all those good reasons, legal reasons, were acted on by good, law-abiding people, a terrible evil was done.

How? How could it happen? Perhaps the truth is that evil is not often done by evil people. Perhaps, rather, it is done by good people grown lazy, dull, insensitive... good people who've let their vision lapse, who've grown too confident, too comfortable with their own righteousness. Good people who've lost the ability to distinguish between what is legal, and what is just.

And that is chilling indeed. Because I know that while I am not a demon, I am all too often dull and foolish, too often insensitive, too sure of my own judgments, too unwilling to truly look at and listen to what is happening around me. Perhaps Christ could die for the same reason that tens of thousands of unborn children can die, quite legally, every year. Perhaps the death of Christ was reasonable, necessary, for the same reason that the build-up of an arsenal of nuclear weapons is reasonable and necessary. Perhaps we keep on doing insanely destructive, evil things simply because we've never really found a good enough reason not to do so. Perhaps we are simply so smug, so morally lazy that we never presume to be critical of our institutions, our "good reasons". Perhaps we simply never say "Stop."

Well. If Easter has passed by the time you read this, you already know that Christ is more powerful than even the worst that we can do. We will, finally, be saved despite ourselves. But how many crucifixions will there be in the meantime? How many more good reasons will we find for doing terrible things?

I don't know. That heavy sky may be a sign of spring, but right now it's still cold outside. And this afternoon it's pretty cold inside as well.

From 1980 through 1982, Father Sandell served as Chaplain to the Bishop O'Reilly Council No. 3918,Grafton, North Dakota Chapter of the Knights of Columbus. "Scattered Thoughts" is a collection of essays based on columns originally written for the Chaplain's Corner, section of the Council's monthly newsletter.